A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that if he were running for re-election today, Mr. Nelson would lose to Nebraska’s GOP Governor David Heineman by a stunning 61% to 30%. Only three years ago, Mr. Nelson won his current term with a solid 64% of the vote.

A decade ago, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, two grandees of American journalism, warned of a crisis: The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal had revealed a news media publishing at “warp speed,” discarding probity for prurience and embracing a non-stop news cycle of aggression, allegation and assertion where once facts were checked and sources confirmed before ministering scandal to the public. Much like a beleaguered Scotty on a hurtling Starship Enterprise, Kovach and Rosenstiel warned that democracy “cannot take it.”

Republican attorneys general in 13 states say congressional leaders must remove Nebraska’s political deal from the federal health care reform bill or face legal action, according to a letter provided to The Associated Press Wednesday.

I guess bribes don’t work as well as they used to. You’d think that, with all the lawyers in Congress, they could hide it a bit better.

Actually they’re — you guessed it! — whining about a possible “backlash.” This whole article is absurd, however, since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab did not try to blow up Flight 253 because he was Nigerian, but because he was Muslim and believed it his religious duty to wage war against Infidels. But apparently the Times was tired of writing about fears of a backlash against Muslims when one never materializes, and so they gave a new twist to an old story angle by worrying about a backlash against Nigerians instead. The Muslim angle does come in, but not until late in the story.

A devout Rockland County couple is suing the New York Archdiocese for barring their daughter from attending a Catholic preschool because she hasn’t been fully vaccinated.

The couple, who filed the suit anonymously, charges they’re being subjected to religious discrimination and are seeking a court order allowing their 4-year-old to attend the St. Margaret School in Pearl River after the archdiocese turned down their request for a religious exemption.

I was under the impression that ‘religious discrimination’ was sort of the whole point behind having Catholic schools. Shows how much I know.

California’s Progressives achieved breakthrough victories in the 1910 elections. With some running as Democrats, others as Republicans, and still others disdaining party labels altogether, Progressives won governing majorities in the state legislature. Hiram Johnson, the candidate of the “Lincoln-Roosevelt League,” was elected governor, and later became Theodore Roosevelt’s vice-presidential running mate on the Progressive ticket in 1912. (One reason Roosevelt carried California that year was the Progressives were powerful enough to keep the Republican nominee off the ballot; President William Howard Taft was forced to seek California’s electoral votes as a write-in candidate.)

At next year’s parades marking the centenary of the Progressives’ triumph, confetti suppliers and marching bands may have to be paid with IOU’s instead of cash. California’s bonds are rated lower than any other state’s; its budget deficit, relative to the size of the state’s population, is higher than any other’s. The current recession is the proximate cause of California’s crisis, but other states devastated by the economic downturn, such as New York and Florida—even Michigan—face choices about taxes and spending that are far less dire. A growing number of observers argue that California’s real problem is that it has become ungovernable. Kevin Starr, for example, who just published the eighth volume in his comprehensive history of the Golden State, recently told an interviewer, “In our public life, we’re on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country.”

Rome wasn’t sacked in a day, and California didn’t become Argentina overnight. Its acquired incapacity to manage its own affairs has been a long, complicated story, with many contributing factors rather than a single villain or tragic flaw. No analysis of California’s political demise, however, would be complete without discussing how the Progressive legacy has undermined the state’s ability to govern itself.

These strong opinions for and against smoking were not supported by much evidence either way until 1950 when Richard Doll and Bradford Hill showed that smokers seemed more likely to develop lung cancer. A campaign was begun to limit smoking. But Sir Ronald Fisher, arguably the greatest statistician of the 20th century, had noticed a bizarre anomaly in their results. Doll and Hill had asked their subjects if they inhaled. Fisher showed that men who inhaled were significantly less likely to develop lung cancer than non-inhalers. As Fisher said, “even equality would be a fair knock-out for the theory that smoke in the lung causes cancer.”

Mark Steyn takes a stab at answering the question posed by John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia.

Islam is bilingualism on steroids. When the community reaches the size it’s now at in Yorkshire or Malmo or Rotterdam, it has the ability to self-segregate and you wind up on the road to “two solitudes”, parallel societies. (That partially explains the second- and third-generation disassimilation Derb references.) For example, we think of Amsterdam-to-Detroit as a flight between two western cities. But if you’re Muslim it’s a flight between two outlying provinces of the dar al Islam – the fast Islamifying Amsterdam and Dearborn, Michigan.

The blubbery sea lions at Pier 39, one of San Francisco’s smelliest and most famous tourist attractions, are gone. During the last week of November, they left the wooden docks on which they’ve spent the last 20 years and no one knows if they’ll be coming back.

It seems that our federal government is unable to locate its own rear end with both hands and a flashlight. What a surprise!

Indeed. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Planes are flimsy things. They have to be to get off the ground. If, as seems likely, we are in an arms race between, on one side, crazy jihadis fired up with visions of paradise, and on the other, bored airport-security personnel on minimum wage, it looks inevitable that sooner or later the jihadis will score one. What’s to be done?

What do you get when you take a bad science fiction writer with a desire for immortality and add a lust for tax breaks? Scientology. What do you get when you take a neo-marxist felon and add a desire for black nationalism? Kwanzaa. What do both Kwanzaa and Scientology have in common? They are fraudulent products of post-modern culture given legitimacy by a press hell bent on diminishing the Judeo-Christian heritage in the United States.